R. Buckminster Fuller's criticism of Technopolies
Buckminster Fuller was an inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, cosmologist, poet and a bodhisattva. He called himself a "human guinea pig," after realizing that his attempts at securing a career only took off once he stopped trying to get something for his own benefit and committed his mind fully to the benefit of all human beings. To this end, he was awarded 25 US patents, and is responsible for the geodesic dome designs which now number over 300,000 worldwide.
He repeatedly stated that the scarcity based economic model was completely false; "there is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance" was his assessment of the late 20th century state of the world. Fuller had been a student at Harvard, and was incisively critical of the pipeline that fed bright young academics into the rigid gatekeeping roles in the energy and military industries.
In chapter One of his book Grunch of Giants, Fuller writes: "There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation--"a grunch of giants." GR-UN-CH, which stands for annual GROSS UNIVERSE CASH HEIST, pays annual dividents of over one trillion dollars [in 1983].
GRUNCH is engaged in the only-by-instruments-reached-and-operated, entirely invisible chemical, metallurgical, electronic, and cybernetic realms of reality. GRUNCH's giants average thirty-four years of age, most having grown out of what Eisenhower called the post-World War II "military industrial complex." They are not the same as the pre-World War II international copper or tin cartels. The grunch of giants consists of the corporately interlocked owners of a vast invisible empire, which includes airwaves and satellites; plus a vast visble empire, whcih includes all the only eighteen-year old and younger skyscraper cluster cities around the world, as well as the factories and research laboratories remotely ringing the old cities and all the Oriental industrial deployment, such as in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It controls the financial credit system of the noncommunist world together with the financial means of initiating any world-magnitude mass-production-and-distribution ventures. By making pregraduaton employment contracts with almost all promising university science students, it monopolizes all the special theoretical know-how to exploit its vast inventory of already acquired invisible know-how technology.
Who runs GRUNCH? Nobody knows. It controls all the world's banks. Even the muted Swiss banks. It does what its lawyers tell it to. It maintains technical legality and is prepared to prove it. Its law firm is named Machiavelli, Machiavelli, Atoms & Oil. Some think the second Mach is a cover for Mafia.
GRUNCH didn't invent Universe. It didn't invent anything. It monopolizes know-where and know-how but is devoid of know-why [emphasis mine]. It is preoccupied with absolute selfishness and its guaranteed gratifications. It is as blind as its Swiss banks are mute." (p 1-2)